Communication service providers (also referred to herein as CSPs) are finding themselves in the midst of multiple evolutions in usage, end-point technology, monetization models and top-valued services. As such, communication service providers must profitably leverage their network capabilities, provide novel differentiating services and, in some cases, accommodate third-party developers.
In response to current demands, communication service providers currently offer a variety of services to operate, manage and maintain open application programming interface (API) platforms. By definition, open API platform assets are routinely exposed. As such, challenges for providers that implement open API platforms include protecting network interfaces from general access (i.e., security), efficiently providing network authorizations and enforcing service level agreements.
The architecture of an open API platform may be designed to accommodate various internal components and external components, including third-party components, to provide services. For example, open API platforms can be designed to accommodate external components to provide network-based messaging services, network-based location services (e.g., geo-fencing), secure commercial payment services (e.g., mobile banking) and bandwidth management for guaranteed quality of service (QoS), (e.g., for delivering and streaming mobile video).
In addition, run-time fault detection is generally essential to operate, manage and maintain services associated with an open API platform. Run-time fault detection includes a determination of whether a component is currently processing a transaction or has frozen or failed. One issue for API platform run-time fault detection (and other API platform operations) is that a variety of components that lack homogeneity must be accommodated. As such, an ideal infrastructure for fault detection and other operations would be applicable system-wide and implemented in a regular and repeatable fashion. Therefore, it would be advantageous to design an infrastructure to efficiently detect run-time faults across the many internal and external components of an open API platform.